Puzzle
by Rhelle
Summary: A Shadi introspective, into the magics of the Millenium Items, the powers that made him what he is, and the universal mysteries that are the heart of that magic and ourselves. {Very philosophical and well-written. My personal favortie of all my fics}


Well, I got the idea for this one from smoking crack and reading Alice Borchardt's new novel. It's all nice and musing and philosophical. And it's from Shadi's view, because you never -

Shadi: I'M THE REAL SLIM SHADY!

Uh…yeah…anyway. The fic. Here ya go.

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Puzzle

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"I serve truth because I have found, over the years, there is little else to serve"

Some say I am dead, a shade among the living. I am not. I am not dead, because I was never alive. There is no soul in my eyes because I'm not sure I ever had one.

Nor am I a god. The Egyptians thought me one, but I am not and never was.

No. Before the gods that made the gods was I. Compared to me, they are but children.

What am I, then?

I give a little sigh. A fool's question. Trying to grasp the answer is like trying to grasp starlight.

I am, I suppose, my purpose. The Millenium Items. They give me my purpose, and I help them along in theirs. And, believe you me, there is nothing without a purpose.

No, true enough, it was not I who first created them - that was the Pharoah's duty. But after his soul was sealed away in the Puzzle and his body in the tomb, one was needed with the power and wisdom to guide the forces of the Millenium Items from centruy to century.

The Egyptians, as I have said, knew of my existence, my power. They called out to me, and I answered. They asked...and I said yes.

Because, you see, with magics as pure and raw as those of the Items, something else is needed to restrain and maintain them - to counterbalance them, if you please, for indeed it is a balance that's needed.

I understood this. Understood it so well, in fact, that I gave myself eternally to its service. To the balance.

The Millenium Items are power, as I said, in all its force and complexity. And power is devoted neither to good nor ill; to it, both are merely a matter of perspective.

I am wisdom, sublte and simple. After all my years, after all I have seen, little else remains.

And so we are given to each other, the Items and I, that I might give my wisdom to restrain their power, and they their power to give me the wisdom to do so. And in such a way, we came to define each other in this, our new existence.

They gave me shape and form, same as I gave them. I made them what they are, as they did me. Paradoxal, yes, but in paradox very often lies the truth.

And it was they who gave me my name. Shadi. Singer. Because the singer is the creator to the ancients; the gods sang all creation into being. Because, in the darkness of the world before life dawned, there was no song, no sound, not even silence. Only emptiness.

Because life is an arc of song and light and substance against that emptiness, that darkness and desolation.

...But was I ever a part of that song? Before the Millenium Items, what was I? Was I ever - really - alive?

A voice in me speaks, softly, in its way without words: _Were you? Were any of us?_

Yes...for we all wonder such things, don't we? All questions lead back to the first: _What am I? What is all this?_

It is a part of us, these questions about our world and ourselves, and the endless, restless, relentless need for the answers to them.

I myself do not know, and I'm not sure I ever can. But I never cease wondering.

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What am I? What is all this?

The truth of it is, I think, that there is more to the answers to those questions and our own existence than we know or could ever comprehend.

For how could we ever fully comprehend this world we live in, this universe - and ourselves, the universe inside of us? The path of the shuttle through warp and weft, the click of wheels within wheels, a hundred billion hearts, minds, and souls on a thousand worlds? Such things are not only unknown and unknowable, but completely incomprehensible. And yet, all parts of the same.

Reality, you see, is a fractured, fragmented thing, of many facets and many pieces - but all were born from the death-explosion of that one great dying star, all born from the same God. We are, all and everything, pieces of the same.

My fingers play along the gold, the flash and shimmer of sunlight caught in stone. The Millenium Puzzle.

Do you think it's any accident that the greatest power of the ancient world was made in the form of a puzzle? It is a talisman, a testament to the knowledge of the ancients.

The knowledge that we are, all of us, a puzzle made up of a thousand different pieces that we are forever trying to make sense of and put together - never knowing that we are but a piece in the puzzle of existence.

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~*FINIS*~

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Like it? Hate it? WELL, THEN, REVIEW, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!

God: Hey! ;-;

Shadi: I'M THE REAL SLIM SHADY!

Yeah…just review….


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